Nudity,feminists,and Chinese online censorship: A case study on the anti-domestic violence campaign on SinaWeibo

Abstract

Chinese feminist activists are actively participating in the Chinese online public sphere. In this study, we examine a case – the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos Campaign (裸照反家暴活动) – and the response of Chinese online censorship to this campaign. Campaign activists used nude photos to mobilize the public’s support. According to the existing theoretical perspectives such as the collective action potential theory, this kind of online campaign with pornographic elements and the potential to mobilize people is very likely to be censored. Counter to this expectation, we found that not all of the original photos were removed. Our finding suggests that the interactive manner in which activists responded to the public on SinaWeibo’s discussion threads matters in terms of the degree of censorship. This study complements the existing studies on the Chinese online censorship system, echoes scholars’ call for studies on censorship from a more interactive angle, and furthers our understanding of the Chinese feminist movement.

Keywords

online activism censorship feminist movement anti-domestic violence online interaction microblogs

Scholars of authoritarian censorship and Internet activism have long found China to be an interesting and puzzling case.¹ China has the most netizens in the world, and it maintains an ever-expanding online censorship system to monitor online activities.² Researchers have focused on understanding the logic of the Chinese online censorship system – what and when contents get censored.³ Applying one of the most recent and influential theories – the collective action potential theory – Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts argue that the Chinese government only removes posts that have the potential to initiate collective action.⁴ Relying on data collected from more than a thousand Chinese websites and millions of posts, the authors convincingly show that the country’s censorship system allows ordinary Chinese people to make critical online comments about the government but that the system prevents posts that incite the kind of activities that tend to mobilize people. In other words, China practises differential censorship.

In this article, we examine the relationship between online interactions and the likelihood of being censored. We base our analysis on the case of the campaign ‘Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos’ (裸照反家暴活动), which took place at the end of November 2012. This was a campaign to assist the work of women’s organizations seeking to reform Chinese family law and to push for the enactment of a law on anti-domestic violence.⁵ As a part of the effort, 17 feminists posted their nude photos on SinaWeibo (a large Chinese microblogging platform) and created a campaign homepage to gather support for the online petition.⁶ On the face of it, the campaign would seem the most likely candidate for censorship. Not only did it intend to mobilize the public, obtain activists’ support, and build on connections to offline communities, but it also included material that the Chinese government deems pornographic. The Chinese government has become more relentless when it comes to feminist activists, such as the detainment of five young feminist activists on International Women’s Day in 2015.⁷ During the 2012 campaign period, only two out of the 16 nude photos posted were removed. Why were not more taken down? Why did the system treat different photos differently? We argue that the said campaign reveals a shortcoming in the collective action potential theory. According to this theory, censorship systems differentiate ordinary posts from posts with mobilizing potential, but when applied to the case of China the theory does not tell us how and when its censorship system treats posts differentially.

We argue that in this case the online interaction of activists with netizens, against the background of a strong social movement, explains the government’s approach to censorship. Reasons for censorship are not solely based on slogans, political claims, or even publicity (i.e. how many times posts are shared), which are the narrower aspects of the collective action potential. Rather, the reasons for being censored are associated with the pattern of interaction between the original posters (mobilizers) and netizens. Using data surrounding the posting of 16 photos and corresponding responses (more than 3000 in total), we identified two patterns of interactions – those that escalated and those that remained constrained. We found that escalating interaction accounted for the two censored cases. If a poster was clearly an activist and the online interaction generated solidarity among followers and commenters, censors appeared to view that particular post as being more likely to escalate interaction, in which case the original post was more likely to be censored. Our study presents a rare qualitative test of a leading theory on state control of online discourse and helps refine the theory. By bringing interaction into the analysis, the findings documented in this article provide a more sophisticated understanding of the Chinese Internet censorship system and strategies used by activists to confront censorship.

Internet activism and the Chinese censorship system

Internet and information and communications technologies have transformed how activists organize social movements, launch protests, and interact with each other. Although there are debates over whether these changes really advance social movements, very few scholars would disagree that the Internet has played an increasingly important role in social movements, contentious politics, and social change.⁸ The question then is about the extent to which the use of these technologies transforms the field. Scholars have argued that the Internet is a powerful tool for mobilizers.⁹ At the same time, studies have also found that reaching the full mobilization potential requires both online and offline connections.¹⁰ The increasing importance of the Internet has led scholars to propose alternative theories about the kinds of collective action that take place in networked societies.¹¹

China presents one of the most interesting and puzzling cases in research on the Internet and social movements. It is the world’s largest authoritarian state, and it has the largest population of netizens.¹² The sheer number of Chinese netizens presents a dilemma of control for the Chinese government.¹³ The advancement of Internet and information and communications technologies greatly facilitates the efficiency of the government, and such technologies are promoted by the government as one of the nation’s economic development strategies.¹⁴ The online economy has been burgeoning in China in the past decade and has created many giant Internet companies (e.g. Alibaba). At the same time, online activism has also grown explosively.¹⁵ The tension between developing a vibrant information economy and preventing the Internet from becoming an incubator of anti-government efforts has been theorized by several scholars. One popular way of conceptualizing online censorship is to see it as a top–down process dominated by the state.¹⁶ However, while recognizing the strong presence of the state, many scholars have found that the government’s role cannot explain the complexity of the experiences of Chinese citizens online.¹⁷ Following Guobin Yang’s influential multi-dimensional approach, an increasing number of scholars have therefore adopted a co-evolutionary framework for analysing the Chinese online public sphere and its potential impact on civil society and authoritarianism.¹⁸

The Chinese censorship system still attracts most of the scholarly attention simply because the evolution of censorship is significant for understanding the resilience of the Chinese authoritarian regime and the scale of its control. Internet censorship belongs to the larger cultural governance campaign the Chinese state uses to implement its ideological dominance and to promote state propaganda.¹⁹ The Chinese censorship system has three core components: (1) the ‘great firewall’ that prevents the exposure of the ordinary Chinese people to foreign media; (2) an automatic keyword block that preempts the appearance of sensitive materials; and (3) a massive team composed of trained individuals with the primary goals of not only removing dangerous posts but also propagating pro-government discourse online. Studies have revealed that the logic of China’s censorship system is not to crack down on all information unfriendly to the state. Instead, as terms such as ‘strategic censorship’ or ‘differential censorship’ imply, the state has developed a set of strategies to control the virtual world.²⁰

One of the most influential theories to describe the Chinese censorship system is the collective action potential theory advanced by King, Pan, and Roberts in their study drawing on data collected from more than three million posts of more than a thousand Chinese websites. They found that the censorship system is especially sensitive to posts with what they call collective action potential. According to them, collective action potential refers to ‘people who join together to express themselves collectively, stimulated by someone other than the government, and seem to have the potential to generate collective action’.²¹ Their study found posts with the following characteristics to be the most likely candidates for censorship:

Collective action potential (fulfilling one of the following three statements)

1.1. Offline connection: involve protests or organized crowd formation outside the Internet

1.2. Activist relations: relate to individuals who have organized or incited collective action on the ground in the past

1.3. Nationalist: relate to nationalism or nationalist sentiments that have incited protests or collective action in the past

Pornographic elements

Criticism towards the censors

Based on these criteria, the case of the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign poses a puzzle. Although the materials used in the campaign did not criticize censors, they satisfied the first and second criteria listed above. The materials were used to mobilize people, contained photos of activists’ naked bodies, and involved posters with activist backgrounds to a certain extent; the campaign also had offline connections. In addition, the campaign does not fit the uncensored category described by the collective action potential theory in which a small number of posts are uncensored when posted outside of the period when an associated collective action is taking place. All of the photos were posted during the campaign period and they directly related to a collective action event with a high censorship level. Another plausible explanation is that the Chinese government is more tolerant towards women’s activism. However, if this is true, why were some photos nonetheless censored? Allowing most of the campaign posts to remain online also does not fit with the government’s recent crackdown on women’s groups and feminist activists in China. Thus, viewed from different angles, all of these photos should have been censored in the first place. However, this was not the case.

The significance of online interaction

In order to explain the government’s censorship behaviour in the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign, we have to take online interactions into account, that is, the pattern of responses between the original posters and netizens on the thread that followed each photo. As it stands, the collective action potential theory does not take the process of online interactions into consideration. Similar to other microblogging websites, SinaWeibo users leave comments on posts and interact with one another through conversation exchanges within a thread. Hardly do we find a post without an interaction between an original poster and netizens at large. For a public campaign such as the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign, these interactions mattered since the activists wanted to attract public attention and discussion to promote the campaign. They did this by encouraging netizens to leave comments and to participate in the discussion. The campaign received more public attention as people shared their posts on their own personal blogs or other online outlets. It was a dynamic process that involved the original posters, other activists, and both sympathetic and unsympathetic netizens. According to Yang, such interactions constitute various kinds of online cultures.²²

In contrast to this interactive and relational view, there is a tendency in the collective action potential theory and other similar perspectives to treat every post as an isolated and independent event. This is understandable because data collection techniques are limited and they prevent researchers from investigating beyond the static characteristics of posts. It is much easier to focus on the fixed characteristics of posts (e.g. slogan, contents, and personal background of posters) than on the interactions surrounding a post. But, as we just described, interaction is as important as the static characteristics of posts. This interactive characteristic is not given proper consideration in the current discussion on Chinese censorship and the strategies of activists.

Interaction matters to social movements. Past studies on offline mobilization have shown that interaction can cause serious outcomes, such as the bloody repression of a mass protest or the demise of a movement.²³ Online interaction makes a difference to the censorship system and to the strategies of activists. For activists, the ultimate goal is to maximize support from netizens. They try to use interactive strategies to convey their messages and persuade netizens to support their campaign. Ideally, if both sides interact in a peaceful and rational way, we expect that the outcome will be for netizens either to accept the views of activists or to quietly retreat from the discussion thread. However, in reality, this is rarely the case. Documented interactions from the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign typically involved hate speech, condemnation, discrimination, and even threats. This led to different interactive patterns. From the censorship side, we argue that interactive patterns mattered to the state and that censors used the pattern of interaction to gauge the potential of conflict triggers or large-scale collective action.

Data and methods

We used multiple kinds of data in this research. Our data came from three sources: online observation, semi-structured interviews, and interaction records. The first author participated in the SinaWeibo campaign as a participant observer with a registered ID and conducted observation for three months (November 2012 to January 2013) during the campaign period. Then, she conducted interviews with seven activists in the campaign via Skype and email after the campaign ended. Each interview lasted between one and two hours or comprised four to five email exchanges. Activists were asked whether their posts were censored, and about their experiences in interacting with netizens, their connections to other participants, and their motivation for posting nude photos. These personal communications also helped us compile information about each activist’s biographic profile, social relationships, and previous involvement in women’s and gender activism in China.

Our most important source of information came from a collection of more than 3000 interaction records of the 16 posts for the campaign. In fact, 17 photos were originally posted but one was quickly deleted by its owner for personal reasons. We excluded this self-deleted photo and examined the remaining 16 posts and photos in the study. When a photo was posted, each had its own discussion thread that invited comments and interaction. The very nature of microblogging made it much easier for the original posters of the photos to attract and generate public attention. The way we see it, the greater Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photo campaign was composed of 16 sub-campaigns. These sub-campaigns were organized around each photo. We collected all of the online conversations related to each photo at the end of our research period. The ability to attract public attention varied greatly across the 16 sub-campaigns. Some photos attracted much greater attention than others. The most popular photo was shared around 1401 times, while the least popular was shared only 15 times. The most commented upon photo had 443 comments, while the least commented upon had only nine comments. Detailed information will be provided when we discuss each photo.

Our analysis was divided into two steps. First, we applied the criteria derived from the collective action potential theory to the data. We coded the slogans written on the bodies of the activists in the photos and determined their aesthetic style to evaluate their potential for collective action. This step generated less variation among the photos than we expected. Most photos shared similar slogans and claims. Second, we read and analysed the texts of all interactions. We assigned a value to the level of involvement of the original posters in the interactions, including the frequency of response, the type of response, and the attitudes shown in responses. We found a great variation in the interactions relating to each photo.

The mobilization of the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign on SinaWeibo

We first discuss the mobilization structure on SinaWeibo to give readers a basic idea of how online activism is organized in China. Similar to many microblogging platforms, SinaWeibo offers individuals or groups the opportunity to create their own microblogging websites.²⁴ Owners of the sites can post texts, photos, and multimedia objects (e.g. photos and video). SinaWeibo has features to share, tag, respond, and follow, just like Twitter and Facebook, making it a powerful communication tool. Because of its popularity and influence, SinaWeibo is regarded by scholars as a platform with many positive effects on communication, solidarity, and better governance.²⁵

The Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign was intended to assist an offline petition in support of grass-roots monitoring of the enactment of the Anti-Domestic Violence Law in China. On 7 November 2012, an email titled ‘16 Days of Activism Against Domestic Violence Campaign is calling for action! We welcome your participation!’ (反家暴16日行动号角已经吹响! 期待您的加入) was sent to a feminist mailing list in China in preparation for the women’s rights campaign taking place from 25 November 2012 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women) to 10 December 2012 (International Human Rights Day). The countdown for signature collection began on 25 November 2012 with the ‘Petition Letter by Ten Thousand Chinese Citizens Concerned about the Enactment of the Anti-Domestic Violence Law’ (反家暴法立法万人联名信). Through the collaborative efforts of various pro-feminist organizations, the petition collected hundreds of signatures, but public interest in the petition campaign waned over time. In order to ‘catch more eyeballs’ (吸引眼球) for the petition, feminist activists had to come up with more innovative strategies to attract greater public attention.

The Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign was designed to raise public attention for this offline mobilization. The campaign organizers created a main petition website and spread the news on each sponsoring organization’s SinaWeibo site. Many feminist organizations, such as Feminist Voices (女权之声), shared the mobilization information on their own SinaWeibo page (see the left portion of Figure 1). Netizens could follow the page and see the number of followers in the right column of the webpage. The right portion of Figure 1 shows a sample page with a nude photo and the discussion thread under the photo. The row under the photo shows the number of shares, the number of comments, and the number of people who liked the photo. The discussion thread is where interaction between posters, activists, and netizens takes place.

Figure 1.

The SinaWeibo page of Feminist Voices, one of the campaign sponsors, and the discussion forum under a photo.

All of the photos, when posted, also simultaneously appeared on the site page. Activists frequently posted updated news and provided updates on the number of people who signed the petition on the campaign’s microblog. Most of the posters were involved in Chinese women’s and feminist activist circles. Some were experienced NGO workers while others were student activists. Some posters shared stronger social connections with other posters (e.g. they were partners) while others were connected only through the Internet.

Table 1 summarizes the basic information of the photos and gives a picture of the individual background of the activists involved. As mentioned earlier, we could not obtain accurate information (e.g. age, job, and education) about all the posters. We strived to obtain information from people who were willing to be contacted and interviewed. Thus, for some activists, the information is more comprehensive and exact, while for others we only have a rough picture. Thirteen participants were self-identified females, two were males, and one was a male-to-female transgender. Most of the participants were in their 20s. One was in her 30s and two were in their 40s. The first online nude photo was published on 13 November 2012. The last nude photo appeared on 25 December 2012. The whole online campaign lasted around two months. Most of the photos were posted by the activists themselves but four nude photos were posted by another SinaWeibo user on the campaign homepage. Ten of the activists were located in Beijing, the rest of the photos were posted from Hong Kong, Jinan, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen.

Table 1.

Descriptive information of posters and posts in the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign.

ID	Age	Gender	Date of posting	Activist	# (%) Shares/# (%) comments	Censored during the campaign/survival (# days)
1	23	Female	13/11/12	Yes	1401 (26%)/443 (23%)	No
2	23	Female	15/11/12	Yes	400 (7%)/105 (5%)	No
3	23	Female	21/11/12	Yes	100 (2%)/52 (3%)	No
4	25	Female	22/11/12	Yes	266 (5%)/73 (4%)	No
5	26	Transgender	22/11/12	No	38 (1%)/24 (1%)	No
6	23	Female	22/11/12	Yes	1253 (23%)/413 (21%)	Yes/3
7	26	Female	25/11/12	Yes	750 (14%)/429 (22%)	No
8	20s	Female	27/11/12	Yes	111 (2%)/31 (2%)	No
9	24	Female	27/11/12	Yes	107 (2%)/54 (3%)	No
10	30s	Female	29/11/12	Yes	15 (<1%)/19 (1%)	No
11	40s	Female	07/12/12	Yes	191 (4%) / 64 (3%)	Yes/2
12	40s	Male	08/12/12	No	52 (1%)/9 (<1%)	No
13	20s	Female	08/12/12	Yes	229 (4%)/61 (3%)	No
14	20s	Male	10/12/12	Yes	215 (4%)/54 (3%)	No
15	20s	Female	21/12/12	Yes	87 (2%)/62 (3%)	No
16	20s	Female	25/12/12	Yes	147 (3%)/63 (3%)	No

Most of these posters have had experience in women’s and feminist NGOs. Some were experienced activists and have worked in the field for a while. For example, No. 11, who was in her early 40s, was a leader of an NGO for women’s rights. Most of the younger participants used to intern, volunteer, or work as staff in some related organization. Only a few did not have a clear activist background, but they were the followers or virtual friends of one of the activists. For example, No. 12 was a man and identified himself as a civil servant. In fact, his exact identity remained unclear, but he seemed to be an online follower of one of the activists. He sent his photo to one of the organizers, but his photo was later deleted although the post itself was not removed.

According to the field notes from our participant observations on SinaWeibo during this period, most of these photos had a relatively short time to garner attention after posting. Usually, when a photo was posted, it attracted people’s attention for around a week, then it was quickly overtaken by other more heated and up-to-date micro-topics. Thus, if this campaign wanted to catch more attention and encourage participation in the campaign, there had to be more people forwarding the photos and discussing the issues. Only by doing so, would their messages continue to be circulated and noticed by other SinaWeibo users. In fact, we can roughly divide the campaign into three waves. In the first wave, there were only two photos, No. 1 and No. 2. They were posted before 15 November. Almost a week later, No. 3 was posted on 21 November; three more photos were posted on 22 November, and four photos were posted between 25 November and 29 November. The third wave was from 7 December to the end of the month. There were six photos posted during this period.

The first two photos received much public attention: an average of 900 shares and 274 comments. The eight photos posted in the second wave received an average of 330 shares and 137 comments. The six photos posted in the third wave received an average of 154 shares and 52 comments. This matches our expectation that the first nude photo would be eye-catching and trigger public interest. However, the second and the third photos that received the highest levels of public attention were No. 6 and No. 7. The former generated nearly the same level of public attention as No. 1, and the latter (No. 7) received the second highest number of comments among all photos. Except for these three photos, no other photo received more than 400 comments. In fact, most of the photos received fewer than 100 comments.

There were two photos censored by the system during the two-month campaign period: No. 6 and No. 11. The censors removed the second most publicly discussed photo, but they did not remove the photo that garnered the most attention (No. 1) nor did they remove the photo with the third highest number of comments (No. 7). No. 6 was kept on SinaWeibo for three days during which it gathered a vast amount of public attention. No. 11 was censored the quickest, disappearing from the Internet after only two days.

Previous studies on Chinese censorship have neglected how censors sometimes remove only part of the information on a post rather than removing the entire post. In the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos case, we found that a photo might have been censored but the contents of the original post were kept on the Internet. We found that the censors only removed the image but did not remove the messages nor the whole post. Netizens could still see the post and their comments attached to the original post, but they could not see the photo. This was the case with photo No. 6. However, the censors removed the entire post containing photo No. 11.

Claims and aesthetic dimension of collective action potential

Compared to pure texts, online posts with multimedia such as photos and images add a layer of difficulty in analysis. Most of the extant studies on censorship do not make a clear distinction between posts with pure texts and posts containing multimedia information. However, netizens are shrewd enough to gauge the behaviour of the censors and find a grey zone. For example, netizens often use political satire through various creative manipulations of language and symbols.²⁶ Similarly, in order to avoid the keyword block of the censorship system, Chinese netizens frequently use photos or images as a substitute for pure text. The real meaning is sometimes disguised by the symbolic representation of images. We distinguish two analytical dimensions – the statements made in each photo and the aesthetic style of the photos. We summarize our findings in Table 2.

Table 2.

Statements made by posters and the aesthetic style of the posted photos.

ID	Statements	Aesthetic style
1	Domestic violence is shameful, and I am proud of my flat chest.	Natural
2	Love my body, do not injure it.	Natural
3	The body is innocent, violence is shameful.	Natural
4	Legalize the Anti-Domestic Violence Law.	Natural
5	Caring for women.	Natural
6	Domestic violence is not a private affair, women’s rights are human rights.	Natural
7	Put an end to violence, gender has to be liberated.	Natural
8	How much blood is needed to wake people up?	Provocative
9	Stop! I have had enough.	Provocative
10	Underarm hair is innocent, but domestic violence is shameful.	Natural
11	Blood? Red?	Provocative
12	Men have a share in the legalization of the Anti-Domestic Violence Law.	Natural
13	Menstrual blood is not shameful, but domestic violence is shameful.	Provocative
14	I can be a sissy, but you cannot beat me.	Provocative
15	Who I love can never justify domestic violence.	Provocative
16	It is harder to appeal a case of domestic violence and to prevent it as compared to occupational injury.	Natural

Nude photos were the primary medium for conveying the campaign’s central goal and activists’ personal messages. Through these provocative images, activists wanted to raise people’s attention to the issue of domestic violence and encourage people to sign the petition for the reform of anti-domestic violence laws. Under this general rubric, the 16 photos posted demonstrated great variety in their creativity and use of symbolic representation. Nevertheless, we can identify a master frame of this campaign that is shared by each photo, regardless of their different representations. Most of the photos carried all three focal points of the campaign: anti-domestic violence (反家暴), legislation (立法), and calls for 10,000 signatures (万人签名征集中). Activists wrote personal statements on their body, expressing their views on domestic violence. For example, activist No. 1 wrote: ‘Domestic violence is shameful, and I am proud of my flat chest’ (家暴可耻, 平胸光荣).

The second column of Table 2 lists the personal statements of each photo, which are similar in terms of rhetoric and wording. The most common rhetoric described domestic violence as something shameful. Violence towards women was understood as a crime and should not be tolerated. The activists highlighted the autonomy of women’s bodies in order to raise netizens’ awareness about violence inflicted on women. Activists further drew attention to several taboo subjects traditionally associated with women, such as menstrual blood or underarm hair, to both highlight the discrimination women suffered and emphasize why domestic violence against woman was more shameful. In addition to these claims, photo No. 6 mentioned that women’s rights are human rights (女权是人权). Photo No. 7 argued that gender has to be liberated (性别要解放). The Chinese words for human rights (人权) and liberate (解放), although not the exact words on the blacklist, have more serious connotations.

We categorize two types of aesthetic styles – natural and provocative. By natural, we mean that the activists shared photos of their bodies naturally without further decoration and posturing. The typical natural photo showed the subject standing, front facing forward with both arms at the sides. Words were written on parts of the body. In contrast, provocative photos contained extra layers of embellishment. These included particular style of dressing, different background colours, painted bodies, and exaggerated facial expression and postures. For example, photo No. 9 showed a naked body with numerous red handprints on it, with the activist yelling exaggeratedly.

The third column of Table 2 summarizes the aesthetic styles of these photos. There are 10 photos categorized as natural and six categorized as provocative. The photos with a natural aesthetic style mostly appeared in the early period of the campaign, while the latter style appeared in the later stage. The first in the series of provocative photos is No. 8, in which what appeared to be blood was dripping on a naked body. Blood and the colour red were the most common in the provocative photos, perhaps connoting menstrual blood and physical violence. As the campaign went on, netizens’ attention on the campaign began to wane. We suspect the reason why more provocative photos appeared in the latter part of the campaign was to harness more online attention by using more visually provocative aesthetic elements in addition to the nude bodies.

To summarize our discussion on the substantive differences in each photo in terms of their statements and aesthetic style, we find that these differences do not tell us much about their collective action potential and thus do not help us understand why photos were treated differently by the censors. In fact, we find that all these photos showed equivalent collective action potential given their statements and the symbolic meanings behind the text. Given this unclear situation, how did the censors determine which photo should be removed?

Escalating interaction versus constrained interaction

So far, our discussion has shown that the criteria established by the extant studies on collective action potential cannot fully explain how censorship worked in the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign. The censors did not remove all photos even when all photos were used to mobilize public support. Furthermore, most of the photos showed equivalent collective action potential. Given these circumstances, how the censors determined whether a photo should be removed, based on the information each photo provided, is unclear. We also show that even in cases involving censored photos, the censors did not delete the photos immediately. Rather, it seems that the censors waited to see the levels of interaction the photos elicited and then decided to intervene at a certain point. The question then is what are the kinds of interaction which matter?

To answer this question, we compare two representative cases in the campaign: No. 1 and No. 6. These two cases were almost identical in many aspects. They both drew high public attention when posted. No. 1 had the highest number of shares and comments, and No. 6 was second in terms of shares and third in total number of comments. Both posters were of similar age with similar activist backgrounds and both were fervent feminist activists. However, their messages were different. No. 6 contained politically sensitive words and phrases, such as human rights, but No. 1 did not. However, if politically sensitive language was the reason behind censorship, then we should expect that No. 6 would have been immediately removed by the censors, but it remained online for three days. Because No. 1 and No. 6 shared many similarities, anyone would expect that if one was censored the other would be as well. However, only No. 6 was censored. Given that No. 1 was the initiator of the whole campaign and that it gathered the majority of the traditional media’s attention, why was only No. 6 censored?

After analysing the hundreds of comments from netizens and activists, our conclusion is that the pattern of online interaction diverged in these two cases. In the case of No. 1, the initiator of the whole campaign, the photo attracted all sorts of discussions, criticisms, mockery, and attacks. The initiator and some of her supporters spent time responding to the critiques, albeit with a level of interaction that was chaotic. The poster engaged in dialogue with random netizens who posted insults but the interaction revolved around mostly minor issues (e.g. her small breasts) rather than bigger issues such as the goals of the campaign. Since the discussion did not move in any one clear direction, we label the interaction pattern in No. 1 as constrained.

In contrast, where No. 6 is concerned, we observed from the very beginning that the discussion was dominated by activists who supported the original poster by defending their ideological position and responding to netizens’ critiques. The online interaction in No. 6 moved quickly from lower-level issues (e.g. the size of the poster’s belly and large breasts) to higher-level issues (e.g. the necessity for legal reform), and solidarity among participants in the interaction formed gradually. The active participation of activists in this case further popularized the photo, and the involvement of SinaWeibo celebrities caused a greater increase in the online interaction. We argue that this pattern of escalating interaction accounted for the removal of No. 6 but not No. 1.

The escalating pattern of interaction contained two dimensions – the emergence of solidarity among participants and the extension of the campaign to more popular fields. If the online interaction facilitated a clear plan and agenda of the movement, and increased the solidarity of participants, this would alert the censors. This situation generated more publicity for the campaign as it spread to more popular fields. SinaWeibo, similar to other virtual worlds, is used by numerous celebrities who usually have more than a million followers. Their public influence makes them targets of the censorship system. As a participant noted, ‘Many SinaWeibo posts, if not forwarded by [certain users], are safe. But once they are forwarded by these people [celebrities], the post will be harmonized. This was because these users are targeted by the security monitoring.’²⁷ Therefore, the escalating interaction in No. 6 helped publicize the photo and triggered discussion in more popular fields because it attracted the attention of a microblog celebrity, resulting in the photo being censored. However, as we mentioned before, the censors did not remove the entire post. Instead, only the photo was removed, and the text remained intact. Thus, netizens could still see the post and its comments. One comment read: ‘How come mine [my photo] is deleted but yours is still there?’ And a following comment read: ‘[Yours is] too high-profile.’

To test the validity of our argument that escalating interactions increase the likelihood of censorship, we further examined the interaction pattern of photo No. 7. This image was posted by one of the more experienced activists in this campaign. In addition to heightened public attention, it also contained more sensitive statements. However, it did not get censored during the campaign period. Therefore, No. 7 is a perfect case for the purpose of comparison. If our argument holds, we expect to see that the interaction pattern makes No. 7 less attractive to the censors. From reading through the comments, we found that most of the discussions regarding No. 7 were centred on criticizing the activist’s body. Netizens, not activists, dominated the discussion and made relentless mockery on the relatively chubby body of the poster. Comments, such as ‘this belly is bigger than my father’s’ and ‘it is too fat’ attracted more mockery and sarcasm from other posters. A number of activists did fight back and made some responses at the beginning of the critique, but they gave up on interacting with the deluge of netizens’ comments. It resulted in a similar situation as in No. 1, where a chaotic discussion forum became filled with numerous disputes and conflicts.

Lastly, we would like to discuss photo No. 11, posted by another more senior activist. The photo and post lasted for only two days and both were completely removed by the censors. During its short appearance online, it generated a lot of shares and comments. We consider this case to be the most illustrative of an escalating interaction pattern. Compared to other posts, the comments following the original post were almost exclusively made by feminist activists, NGO workers, and supporters of women’s groups. They expressed a higher than usual solidarity in the interaction and collectively endorsed the photo. Also, the poster’s reputation in the feminist movement made her a target of the censors. Because online interaction escalated so clearly in the beginning, censors were very quick to remove the photo and post altogether.

Discussion: Bringing interaction in

In his influential study on the Chinese Internet, Yang argued that in order to understand Chinese online activism, we have to take a multi-interactionist approach. Despite the increasing advancement of the Chinese state in controlling the Internet, ‘It [the state] also forces activists to be more creative and artful.’²⁸ We followed Yang’s call for an interactionist approach to understand the dynamics between censorship and activists. At the same time, we engaged with the influential collective action potential theory and observed that in its current form, the theory overlooks online interaction. Although the fixed characteristics of the posts were crucial elements for determining the collective action potential, our study shows that given the equivalent collective action potential, the pattern of interaction is key to understanding why some photos were censored while others were not.

In our study, we did not examine all kinds of interactions but only looked at two layers of interaction: interactions among netizens and interactions between censors and the participants of the said campaign. The escalating and constrained patterns of interaction were co-performed by netizens and activists. Many factors (e.g. the intensity of conversation and the style of talk) determined the potential interaction pattern of a discussion thread. Sometimes, the interaction produced unintended effects because mocking comments from some netizens triggered fierce contention unrelated to the movement’s goals, distracting and diluting the focus of the campaign. Another kind of interaction took place between censors and the campaign participants. We argue that censors monitored the pattern of interaction of each photo and intervened when they identified an escalating pattern.

In addition to these two dimensions of interactions, there were other interactions. One was the interaction between the Internet and traditional media. This interaction, often viewed by many activists as the golden rule for maximum effect, requires constant interaction between online media and offline media. Online activists have to make their event ‘a critical event’ circulating on the Internet in the hope of attracting the attention of the traditional media. One participant shared, ‘[The Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign] provided a topic for debate in order to generate a viewpoint. Having a viewpoint is a necessary step before it becomes an event that allows [the viewpoint] to be more widely circulated [by netizens]. Having conflicts and debates during the circulation are crucial to accentuate our viewpoint and to attract the attention of traditional media.’²⁹ Although we do not discuss this logic in detail here, we see how it works in the Anti-Domestic Violence with Nude Photos campaign. The traditional media reports are transmitted back to the Internet to stir netizens’ interest on the topic. This online and offline interaction is another important dimension of interaction.

Finally, there was one other interaction crucial to online activism: the interaction between activists and powerful netizens (Internet celebrities). Although attention from influential netizens definitely increased the exposure of the campaign to different population groups, its negative effect was also obvious. This relationship greatly increased the chances of censors viewing a topic as having an escalating pattern of interaction and of it being censored. For online activists, managing the relationship between their campaign and powerful netizens was a challenging task.

Conclusion

Our study examined the influential collective action potential theory and viewed online activism as interaction. Using a real online mobilization campaign, we critically tested the collective action potential theory. The theory argues that the censorship system differentiates between those with higher collective action potential and those without. The theory is highly applicable to ordinary posts, but not when all posts come from activists and are used for mobilization purposes. Clearly, the system will not censor all posts from activists and the logic of censorship, as we have shown, depends on the pattern of interaction: whether it is escalating or constrained.

Our study therefore helps to improve the collective action potential theory in at least three aspects. First, we complement the theory by examining variations within the realm of activists, a realm that the theory does not deal with very well. We show that although the logic of the censorship system is similar (the mission being to control the collective action potential), interactions are important to censors because interactions allow them to gauge the propensity of interactions to escalate. Second, we improve the theory’s relatively vague measurement of collective action potential. We examine various kinds of characteristics such as the intensity of public attention, activists’ backgrounds, claims, and aesthetic style of posts. Third, we show that we can theorize the relationship between censors and activists as an interactive process. Censors tend to wait and see what activists do, and activists also try to avoid being censored.

Our article further advances the discussion of mobilization techniques used in online activism. Most extant studies use text as their primary unit of analysis but we expand our unit of analysis to include images as well. This is because multimedia materials play an increasingly greater role in the information flow on the Internet. We showed that the use of photos in the campaign required different analytical strategies. Since photos often contain extra layers of symbolic meaning, we attempted to incorporate this aspect in our study by examining the aesthetic style of the photos. The increasing complexities of using multimedia materials in the mobilization of support for a movement are an emerging field that deserves future study.

Our examination of China’s censorship system based on differential collective action potential could shed light on the deactivation of Feminist Voices, the most influential feminist SinaWeibo account, on International Women’s Day in 2018.³⁰ Following our lines of analysis, the deactivation implies that the censors recognized the mobilizing ability of Feminist Voices to effect escalating interactions with powerful online allies at a critical juncture. Instead of deciding what posts to delete after the fact, the censors deactivated the account before feminists could circulate any viewpoints on International Women’s Day. Nevertheless, even though the main account was censored, this particular censorship prompted many feminists to circulate posts on behalf of Feminist Voices in their individual accounts, and their posts were not censored until interactions resulting from these posts escalated.

Lastly, our study pointed out both the positive and negative sides of online activism in China. Our findings confirmed that the Chinese censorship system firmly controls the actions of activists on the Internet. Censors aimed to confine online activism within their domain and to prevent any breaches of boundaries set by the state. However, our study also found that activists used various kinds of creative strategies to attract attention and generate publicity for their campaign and prolong the survival of their voices on the Internet.

Footnotes

Notes

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